LONDON: Despite an awkward public image and the dark story of his rise to power, British opposition leader Ed Miliband is confounding critics ahead of an election that could make him prime minister.
The 45-year-old, long seen as a drag on the Labour party's chances and the target of leadership coup rumours just a few months ago, has matched up surprisingly well against Conservative leader David Cameron in the campaign.
"I've been underestimated at every turn," he said in a fiery exchange with a fearsome interviewer, Jeremy Paxman, during a TV grilling alongside Cameron last month.
"Hell yes I'm tough enough!" he added in response to another Paxman question in a session that one poll showed him winning by 25 percent to the prime minister's 24 percent.
Miliband still has no shortage of critics.
The right-wing press has branded him a diehard left-winger -- "Red Ed" -- while Cameron and others have upbraided him for the banking deregulation that occurred while he was working at the Treasury in the years before the financial crash of 2008.
Much has also been made of the fact that his house in London's well-off Dartmouth Park neighbourhood is big enough to have two kitchens, and of his much-mocked struggle to eat a man-of-the-people bacon sandwich in front of photographers.
For a man with a nasal voice who used to wear Harry Potter-style glasses and who is portrayed by The Guardian's cartoonist as a grinning "Wallace" from "Wallace & Gromit", the geek image is hard to shake off.
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